THE Times office is situated in the best-swept road in Berlin. You could eat an egg off the pavement.

The reason is that the orange cleaning trucks with their huge rotating bristles are obliged to sweep for 14 kilometres before returning to the depot.

The Times street is straight, the neighbours’ Porsches are tucked into parking bays, and it is exactly two kilometres long, so it is cleaned four times a day while the surrounding neighbourhood is allowed to clog up with leaves and crumpled cigarette packets. The dustmen stretch their morning tea break into lunch and then go home.

Could this be a metaphor for a country grown comfortable and lazy? For a system crippled by senseless regulation, that still cossets its workers in a manner last seen in Britain circa 1970? I put this to Angela Merkel, almost certainly the leader of Germany after tomorrow’s election, on the fringes of an election rally that has left us both a little tired and frayed. The story is long, her attention drifts.

“We’ll change it!” she snapped before I had quite reached the punchline. The truth is, though, that Frau Merkel probably will not be able to change these practices or any of a hundred thousand protective rules that are holding back Germany.

The odds are firmly on Angela Merkel beating Gerhard Schröder, the present Chancellor, but she is unlikely to win a convincing mandate for change. The best she can hope for is a narrow majority for her Christian Democrats together with the small, pro-business Free Democrats — a few Molotov cocktails short of the promised conservative revolution.

“I think Angela Merkel is destined to be a weak leader,” says Professor Bill Chandler, of the University of California, one of America’s shrewdest observers of Germany. “She is likely to be a Chancellor of the calibre of Ludwig Erhard or Kurt Kiesinger.” As Economics Minister, Erhard was the celebrated architect of Germany’s postwar economic miracle. As a Chancellor he was mediocre. As for Kiesinger, he was the ill-starred leader of Germany’s only attempt at a grand coalition between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in 1966. It was a short-lived experiment.

A similar fate could be awaiting Frau Merkel, because too many people, including leading members of her party, want her to fail. Germany’s fear of change is greater than its fear of decline. As a result no German leader can truly lead. That was apparent in the last, stagnant years of Helmut Kohl and the restless, unfulfilled seven years of Herr Schröder.

This election campaign has highlighted the conundrum. It has not been a contest between those who want change and those who do not. Rather it is about who can best conceal the pain of reform from a change-resistant society.

How could it have come to this? In 1990 Margaret Thatcher was desperately anxious about the emergence of a strong, resurgent, re-united Germany that would dominate Europe. Today Europe is worried about a chronically weak Germany. Since unification Germany has been slipping down the league tables, big and debilitated like Samson shorn of his hair. Gabor Steingart, author of Decline of a Superpower, sees it as a case of indigestion: east Germany cannot be properly swallowed. “Look, 4 per cent of Germany’s GDP is going into propping up the east yet Germany is growing by at best 2 per cent.”

The result is that the country is gobbling up its capital and becoming poorer. Impoverishment, or fear of it, paralyses. It makes people risk-averse.

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Yet this is only a partial explanation for Germany’s failure of nerve. Unification has recorded some extraordinary, unsung successes. Merging the defunct East German military with the West German Bundeswehr to produce a reliable combat-ready army still astonishes anybody with a memory of the Cold War. Germany has helped to stabilise the eastern frontiers of the European Union and largely footed the bill.

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